Sunday, July 12, 2009

Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen (2009) Review


SYNOPSIS:

In the highly-anticipated Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, debuting June 24, 2009, Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) again joins with the Autobots® against their sworn enemies, the Decepticons®. Michael Bay directs from a screenplay by Ehren Kruger & Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman.

The biggest movie of the summer is finally here, but that’s the problem with Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen - it’s just too bloody big. Epic, spectacular but unfortunately far, far too long; the film proves that when it comes to Michael Bay blockbuster movies, you can have too much of a good thing… [IGN]

Everything from the girls to the action in “Transformers 2” is designed for cheap thrills. Bay aims for every low-brow joke in the book. Racial stereotyping, bad sex jokes, and “hilarious” humping scenes are just a few of the gems he’s able to come up with. These cheap jokes actually went over well with the audience in my screening, but when a movie has three humping scenes and none of them involve an actual human doing the humping there’s something wrong with that… [Blogcritics]

This is all standard negative criticism for Bay movies, however. The question you’re all wondering has yet to be fully addressed: Are the action scenes good? My answer is that yeah, they’re pretty sweet. Bay manages to drop the pretense that he was trying to make a film with plot, and just let giant robots fight near or on pyramids. A special note should be made of their IMAX cinematography. The scale of the Transformers and the picture quality really do add a lot of enjoyment to some scenes, notably the ones where Devastator is involved. The acting even manages to improve a bit from bad comic acting to legitimate moments of care and concern for the characters. There’s not much else to say about this; the action is cool, but trying to describe why it’s cool is kind of a futile pursuit… [ScreenJunkies]

The film should really be called “Transformers: Bigger, Longer, Unintelligent.”
In case you missed the first movie and since both films are nearly the same in execution that isn’t really necessary the good robots, called Autobots led by Optimus Prime (voice of Peter Cullen), fight the bad robots, called Decepticons led by Megatron (voice of Hugo Weaving). A human named Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) gets thrown into the battle as the unlikely savior accompanied by a sexy love interest, Mikaela (Megan Fox). Sam’s parents, Ron (Kevin Dunn) and Judy (Julie White), provide comic relief as does John Turturro as Agent Simmons… [MetroWest]

The biggest movie of the summer is finally here, but that’s the problem with Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen - it’s just too bloody big. Epic, spectacular but unfortunately far, far too long; the film proves that when it comes to Michael Bay blockbuster movies, you can have too much of a good thing…read more [IGN]

Transformers is dull, ponderous and overlong, packed to the gills with glamor shots of busy robot designs and Megan Fox, flashes of idiocy (a small robot humping the leg of Fox, who smiles at it fondly) and endless examples of Bay’s increasingly tedious military porn. If summer entertainment is meant to be diverting and imaginative, Revenge of the Fallen succeeds only in that it drove me into periods of catatonic daydreaming, where I imagined watching anything else…read more [/Film]

The human actors are in a witless sitcom part of the time, and lot of the rest of their time is spent running in slo-mo away from explosions, although–hello!–you can’t outrun an explosion. They also make speeches like this one by John Turturro: “Oh, no! The machine is buried in the pyramid! If they turn it on, it will destroy the sun! Not on my watch!” The humans, including lots of U.S. troops, shoot at the Transformers a lot, although never in the history of science fiction has an alien been harmed by gunfire… [Roger Ebert-SunTimes]

Oversexed, underwritten, gun-happy, baffling, and boring as a test pattern, Revenge of the Fallen is little more than an excuse to send robots smashing into each other for an excruciating two-and-a-half hours. There are occasional breaks between explosions for expository soliloquies performed in high-Saturday-morning-cartoon-camp mode. If the rest of the film wasn’t so frantically trying to appeal to adults who ought to know better, this sort of tone would make sense. But by jamming the garbled mythology of a lousy kids’ toy advertisement into a leering, ultra-violent action franchise, the filmmakers create a hybrid monster that at first seems designed to appeal to nobody. But at a time when kids are being pushed to grow up instantly and adults are encouraged to cultivate their arrested development, it makes perfect sense that Michael Bay is waiting for them right in the middle, Happy Meal in hand… read more [Worstpreviews]

Michael Bay’s new “summer-fun” (as he likes to call it) blockbuster Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen starring Shia LaBeouf, Megan Fox, Tyrese Gibson, and Josh Duhamel, is not the roller coaster ride it should be. It starts off with a bang, but ends in a muddle. Although it has many surprises that I did not see coming, because of the excessive use of the same type of explosion over and over again, and the ridiculously long run time, this film is not summer-fun, it’s summer-blah…read more [ScreenCrave]

TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN (2009)

Starring: Shia LaBeouf, Megan Fox, Josh Duhamel, Tyrese Gibson, John Turturro, Rainn Wilson, Isabel Lucas, Matthew Marsden, Darius McCrary

Director: Michael Bay

Studio: DreamWorks Pictures

Rating: PG-13 (For intense sequences of sci-fi action violence, language, some crude and sexual material, and brief drug material.)

Genre: Action / Adventure

Release Date: June 24, 2009

Official Site: http://www.transformersmovie.com/

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